DONNE, JOHN. — English poet and preacher, born in London in 1573, died there on 31 March 1631. Educated in the Catholic religion (his mother belonged to the family of s. Tommaso Moro), he converted to the Anglican Church.
After an adventurous, dissipated, and sceptical youth, attested by his licentious love poems, by the pessimism of the poem Progresse of the Soule, by the cynicism of the Satires, and by his apologia for suicide (Biathanatos), he turned to religious life and was ordained an Anglican priest. He had already won the king’s favour with certain opportunistically anti-Catholic writings (Pseudo-Martyr; Conclave Ignatii, satires against the Jesuits), when the success of his preaching caused him to rise step by step until he became dean of St Paul’s, London. While the Satires are little more than a literary exercise, D.’s lyrics are of great importance for their characteristics and for the influence they exerted on the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets. D. reacted against the prevailing Petrarchism: by subordinating sound to meaning, using the unadorned language of everyday speech, disdaining metrical conventions, and above all taking pleasure in boldness, subtleties, conceits, and baroque images, he produced a new and brilliant work which, although often obscure through an excess of intellectualism, at times attains great beauty. His religious poems earned him a reputation as a mystic, but in reality they do not move the reader: one senses the cold play of intelligence rather than the warmth of faith; exactly the same is true of the sermons, which, despite the rhetorical emphasis and sacred erudition they display, leave one cold. More effective are the poems (and sermons) inspired by the theme of death, which D. deeply felt, and which also redeems, in an aura of noble meditation, certain crude love poems.
